Veteran political analyst Dick Morris tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview that Paul Ryan asked the “seminal question” in his convention speech: Why should voters trust President Barack Obama to fix the economy in a second term when he couldn’t do it in his first?

“It was terrific. He put the Medicare, Obamacare issue in its very proper perspective,” says the best-selling author, whose latest book is “Screwed!: How Foreign Countries Are Ripping America Off and Plundering Our Economy — and How Our Leaders Help Them Do It.”

Watch the exclusive interview here.

“That line that the biggest threat to Medicare is Obamacare was a brilliant line.

“But he did two other things. One is that he really made a generational argument against Obama. We always see Obama as a young candidate.
Well, he’s over 50 now and Ryan is 42 and Ryan really made a very educated and effective push for younger voters when he said college graduates shouldn’t have to sit in their childhood bedrooms looking at the faded posters for Barack Obama and wondering when they’re going to start their lives.

“It was really a generational empathy that he had that was excellent and will be very important.

“The other thing is that he asked the seminal question that will dominate the rest of the election: If you could not turn the economy around in the first term, what are you planning to do different in the second term that will work?”

“It was never that high. The Gallup has Obama beating Romney by 50 to 41 among voters under 30,” Morris says.

“And interestingly, voters who are 18 to 24 are more likely to support Romney than those 24 to 30 because they didn’t live through the campaign of ’08. They don’t have any investments in Obama.

“Clearly [young voters are] in play. Obama’s entire ability to get elected was based on changing the turnout model and there’s a lot of evidence that he can’t change it again this year.

“There will be a significant move of young people away from Obama and a significant number that will not vote.”

Morris also observes: “The tone at the Republican Convention is going to prove to be very different from the tone at the Democratic Convention.
“The positivism, the focus on the future, the optimism, the willingness to get involved and turn things around will be a sharp contrast to a Democratic Convention that will largely focus on negatives.

As for Mitt Romney’s convention speech Thursday night, Morris says: “The most important thing for him to do is to really uplift the nation. A president is kind of the Pope of the secular religion of our democracy and he really has the potential to reach people in a very intimate way and speak to them very directly and change them as well as their opinion of him. Romney can do that.

“This will be a very emotional opportunity to really reshape not just our image of him, but our image of ourselves too.”